This study examines visitors' use of two different electronic guidebook
prototypes, the second an iteration of the first, that were developed to
support social interaction between companions as they tour a historic house.
Three studies were conducted in which paired visitors' social interactions were
video- and audio-recorded for analysis. Using conversation analysis, the data
from the use of prototype 1 and prototype 2 were compared. It was found that
audio delivery methods were consequential to the ways in which visitors
structurally organized their social activity. Further, the availability of
structural opportunities for social interaction between visitors has
implications for the ways in which the learning process occurs in museum
settings.

This paper discusses how a new technology (designed to help pupils with
learning about Shakespeare's Macbeth) is introduced and integrated into
existing classroom practices. It reports on the ways through which teachers and
pupils figure out how to use the software as part of their classroom work.
Since teaching and learning in classrooms are achieved in and through
educational tasks (what teachers instruct pupils to do) the analysis explicates
some notable features of a particular task (storyboarding one scene from the
play). It is shown that both 'setting the task' and 'following the task' have
to be locally and practically accomplished and that tasks can operate as a
sense-making device for pupils' activities. Furthermore, what the task 'is', is
not entirely established through the teacher's initial formulation, but
progressively clarified through pupils' subsequent work, and in turn ratified
by the teacher.

In this paper, we describe how usability provides the indexical ground upon
which design work in a surgery is achieved. Indexical and deictic referential
practices are used (1) to constitute participation frameworks and work sites in
an instructional surgery and (2) to encode and manage participants'
differential access to the relevancies and background knowledge required for
the achievement of a successful surgical outcome. As a site for both learning
and work, the operating room afforded us the opportunity to examine how
usability, which is a critical design consideration, can be used as a resource
for learning in interaction. In our detailed analysis of the interaction among
participants (both co-present and projected) we sought to describe a particular
case of how usability was produced as a relevant consideration for surgical
education in the operating room. In doing so, we demonstrate a set of members'
methods by which actors worked to establish and provide for the relevance of
the anticipated needs of projected users as part of developing an understanding
of their current activity.

The central point of this paper concerns the way the particular contexts of
people, events and loci constitute places through the pragmatics of being and
acting in physical space and how this can give designers traction over place
design. Although we focus here on meaning associated with the concept of
"place", unlike some thinkers, we also believe that spaces have meaning. Our
point is not to engage in a competition between phenomenologies, but to develop
a rich description of the contribution to place of the semantic tangle of
people, events, and loci as an aide in locating design alternatives. The
semantic tangle consists of situated, mutually constituting resources. Patterns
of moves and contexts that define and utilize those resources constitute
different forms of place construction; in this paper, we focus on three: the
linguistic participation of place, ritual, and ephemeral places. Approaches to
CSCW may profit (1) from designing technology for multifaceted appropriation,
(2) from designing specific places for specific people engaged in specific
events in specific locations, or (3) by commutation, that is, a method of
meaning making similar to detecting "just noticeable differences" by
iteratively and self-consciously substituting related meaningful moves and
contexts into the system of meaning.

Places: People, Events, Loci -- the Relation of Semantic Frames in the
Construction of Place

People dynamically structure social interactions and activities at various
locations in their environments in specialized types of places such as the
office, home, coffee shop, museum and school. They also imbue various locations
with personal meaning, creating group 'hangouts' and personally meaningful
'places'. Mobile location-aware community systems can potentially utilize the
existence of such 'places' to support the management of social information and
interaction. However, acting effectively on this potential requires an
understanding of how: (1) places and place-types relate to people's desire for
place-related awareness of and communication with others; and (2) what
information people are willing to provide about themselves to enable
place-related communication and awareness. We present here the findings from
two qualitative studies, a survey of 509 individuals in New York, and a study
of how mobility traces can be used to find people's important places in an
exploration of these questions. These studies highlight how people value and
are willing to routinely provide information such as ratings, comments, event
records relevant to a place, and when appropriate their location to enable
services. They also suggest how place and place-type data could be used in
conjunction with other information regarding people and places so that systems
can be deployed that respect users' People-to-People-to-Places data sharing
preferences. We conclude with a discussion on how 'place' data can best be
utilized to enable services when the systems in question are supported by a
sophisticated computerized user-community social-geographical model.

Concepts of space are fundamental to our understanding of human action and
interaction. The common sense concept of uniform, metric, physical space is
inadequate for design. It fails to capture features of social norms and
practices that can be critical to the success of a technology. The concept of
'place' addresses these limitations by taking account of the different ways a
space may be understood and used. This paper argues for the importance of a
third concept: communication space. Motivated by Heidegger's discussion of
'being-with' this concept addresses differences in interpersonal 'closeness' or
mutual-involvement that are a constitutive feature of human interaction. We
apply the concepts of space, place and communication space to the analysis of a
corpus of interactions from an online community, 'Walford', which has a rich
communicative ecology. A novel measure of sequential integration of
conversational turns is proposed as an index of mutal-involvement. We
demonstrate systematic differences in mutual-involvement that cannot be
accounted for in terms of space or place and conclude that a concept of
communication space is needed to address the organisation of human encounters
in this community.

Documents in Place: Demarcating Places for Collaboration in Healthcare
Settings

The notion of place often connotes our understood reality populated with
people, practices, meanings, and artifacts. This paper suggests that documents,
whether electronic, paper-based, or set in stone, offer important insights into
how people establish and maintain places for communication and coordination.
Data from an ethnographic study in a large hospital system illustrates how
doctors carefully craft their medical histories in various electronic record
systems to demarcate specific places for their communication and coordination
with specific collaborators. Such documents serve as portable places, allowing
the doctors to navigate a constantly changing landscape of relevant patients,
participants, times, and spaces. The documents demarcate such places by
pointing out the interdependencies among particular participants, places, and
times. Doctors care deeply about these documents and they play a central part
not only in securing efficient communication and coordination but also in the
socialization of newcomers. A study of the complex interrelationships between
documents and place, therefore, offers important insights into organizational
environments characterized by distributed and mobile work practices.

The home is a complex environment, designed for general use but shaped by
individual needs and desires. It is a place often shared by several people with
different demands and requirements. It is a place embedded with technologies
utilised at various times by people in diverse ways. Until recently most home
technologies have been primarily functional; aimed at easing domestic chores
such as cooking, washing and cleaning. In the last few years information and
communication technologies have added to the technological complexity of the
home. Entertainment technologies have become increasingly dominant, as the
simple TV has given way to video, DVD and satellite or cable services.
Technologies converge and diverge to create new hybrid experiences; a trend
which we see continuing. Moreover in the future ubiquitous and ambient
computing devices and functions will become hidden and communications between
devices will become more complex. It is against this background that we
undertook a number of studies into the place of technologies and technology use
in the home. We studied the placement and use of existing technologies in five
homes in Scotland using a novel, multi-part, naturalistic methodology.
Transcripts from the studies were analysed using a grounded theory approach in
an attempt to draw out key, recurring concepts concerning technology use at
home. Eight concepts -- place, learning, utility, interaction, control, cost,
lifecycle and privacy -- emerged from this analysis. Additionally, four types
of space were identified in homes; communication, work, leisure (private) and
leisure (public). In this paper we focus on these four spaces and how they fit
in with previous work on places and spaces in the home. We present a
contextually grounded method of investigation of home technologies, the
technology tour, and show how the four spaces in the home can be understood and
represented as maps of the home layout that are often different for different
members of the household. This understanding of place can be set alongside an
understanding of technology where the themes of utility, interaction, cost and
lifecycle are most important. General design issues that cross place and
technology in the home are discussed in the final section of the paper. These
can be used to sensitise designers of both artefacts and physical spaces to the
needs of people and their use of technologies at home.

Of Coffee Shops and Parking Lots: Considering Matters of Space and Place in
the Use of Public Wi-Fi

Wireless local area networks -- or Wi-Fi networks -- are proliferating in
some societies. Our interest in this exploratory essay is to illustrate how
ostensibly free, publicly-accessible Wi-Fi requires users to apply conventional
understandings of space and place (particularly commercial spaces and places)
as they make sense of some ambiguities about proper use in those places. We
show, through an examination of the metaphorical terms used to describe Wi-Fi,
how spatial notions are employed in an attempt to define ownership of the
signal and rights to its use. We consider how place-behaviors require
evaluation of legitimacy of users in public places and of hospitality of Wi-Fi
providers. We observe that commercial interests underpin notions of ownership,
legitimacy and hospitality of social actors in public places like coffee shops
and parking lots. As researchers considering matters of participation in
virtual places, we must first have some appreciation for the normative
constraints and conventions that govern the commercial public places in which
users access "free" Wi-Fi.

Understanding Situated Social Interactions: A Case Study of Public Places in
the City

Ubiquitous and mobile computer technologies are increasingly being
appropriated to facilitate people's social life outside the work domain.
Designing such social and collaborative technologies requires an understanding
of peoples' physical and social context, and the interplay between these and
their situated interactions. In response, this paper addresses the challenge of
informing design of mobile services for fostering social connections by using
the concept of place for studying and understanding peoples' social activities
in a public built environment. We present a case study of social experience of
a physical place providing an understanding of peoples' situated social
interactions in public places of the city derived through a grounded analysis
of small groups of friends socialising out on the town. Informed by this, we
describe the design and evaluation of a mobile prototype system facilitating
sociality in the city by (1) allowing people to share places, (2) indexing to
places, and (3) augmenting places.

JCSCW 2008 Volume 17 Issue 4

This study examines the occurrence of social loafing in technology-supported
teams along with methods for diminishing loafing. A controlled laboratory
experiment with a 3x2x2 factorial design is used. The independent variables --
feedback, anonymity, and group size -- are manipulated experimentally. It was
expected that social loafing -- a widely observed phenomenon -- would indeed
occur in technology supported teams. It was also expected that the traditional
means of reducing social loafing (i.e., identifiability and feedback) within
physical work environments would also have similar effects within
technology-supported work environments. As expected, social loafing is found to
occur in teams operating in a technology-driven realm. An unexpected finding is
that social loafing is measurable only when participants are provided
self-feedback. While other forms of feedback have a positive influence on
productivity, they fail to reduce this phenomenon, and identifiability of group
members is found to have no observable effect on social loafing.

Physical and Digital Artifact-Mediated Coordination in Building Design

We conducted an ethnographic field study examining how a building design
team used representational artifacts to coordinate the design of building
systems, structure, and architecture. The goals of this study were to
characterize the different interactions meeting participants had with design
artifacts, to identify bottlenecks in the design coordination process, and to
develop design considerations for CSCW technology that will support in-person
design coordination meetings of building design teams. We found that gesturing,
navigation, annotation, and viewing were the four primary interactions meeting
participants had with design artifacts. The form of the design information (2D
vs. 3D, digital vs. physical) had minimal impact on gesture interactions,
although navigation varied significantly with different representations of
design information. Bottlenecks in the design process were observed when
meeting participants attempted to navigate digital information, interact with
wall displays, and access information individually and as a group. Based on our
observations, we present some possible directions for future CSCW technologies,
including new mechanisms for digital bookmarking, interacting with 2D and 3D
design artifacts simultaneously, and enriched pointing techniques and pen
functionality.

The CACHE Study: Group Effects in Computer-supported Collaborative Analysis

The present experiment investigates effects of group composition in
computer-supported collaborative intelligence analysis. Human cognition, though
highly adaptive, is also quite limited, leading to systematic errors and
limitations in performance -- that is, biases. We experimentally investigated
the impact of group composition on an individual's bias, by composing groups
that differ in whether their members initial beliefs are diverse (heterogeneous
group) or similar (homogeneous group). We study three-member, distributed,
computer-supported teams in heterogeneous, homogeneous, and solo (or nominal)
groups. We measured bias in final judgment, and also in the selection and
evaluation of the evidence that contributed to the final beliefs. The
distributed teams collaborated via CACHE-A, a web-based software environment
that supports a collaborative version of Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (or
ACH, a method used by intelligence analysts). Individuals in Heterogeneous
Groups showed no net process cost, relative to noninteracting individuals. Both
heterogeneous and solo (noninteracting) groups debiased strongly, given a
stream of balanced evidence. In contrast, individuals in Homogenous Groups did
worst, accentuating their initial bias rather than debiasing. We offer
suggestions about how CACHE-A supports collaborative analysis, and how
experimental investigation in this research area can contribute to design of
CSCW systems.

This paper presents a workplace study of triage work practices within an
emergency department (ED). We examine the practices, procedures, and
organization in which ED staff uses tools and technologies when coordinating
the essential activity of assessing and sorting patients arriving at the ED.
The paper provides in-depth empirical observations describing the situated work
practices of triage work, and the complex collaborative nature of the triage
process. We identify and conceptualize triage work practices as comprising
patient trajectories, triage nurse activities, coordinative artefacts and
exception handling; we also articulate how these four features of triage
practices constitute and connect workflows, organize and re-organize time and
space during the triage process. Finally we conceptualize these connections as
an assessing and sorting mechanism in collaborative work. We argue that the
complexities involved in this mechanism are a necessary asset of triage work,
which calls for a reassessment of the concept of triage drift.

JCSCW 2008 Volume 17 Issue 5/6

Preface to the Special Issue on 'Consistency Management in Synchronous
Collaboration'

Collaborative editing enables a group of people to edit documents
collaboratively over a computer network. Customisation of the collaborative
environment to different subcommunities of users at different points in time is
an important issue. The model of the document is an important factor in
achieving customisation. We have chosen a tree representation encompassing a
large class of documents, such as text, XML and graphical documents and here we
propose a multi-level editing approach for maintaining consistency over
hierarchical-based documents. The multi-level editing approach involves logging
edit operations that refer to each node. Keeping operations associated with the
tree nodes to which they refer offers support for tracking user activity
performed on various units of the document. This facilitates the computation of
awareness information and the handling of conflicting changes referring to
units of the document. Moreover, increased efficiency is obtained compared to
existing approaches that use a linear structure for representing documents. The
multi-level editing approach involves the recursive application of any linear
merging algorithm over the document structure and we show how the approach was
applied for real-time and asynchronous modes of collaboration.

Operational transformation (OT) is an optimistic concurrency control method
that has been well established in realtime group editors and has drawn
significant research attention in the past decade. It is generally believed
that the use of OT automatically achieves high local responsiveness in group
editors. However, no performance study has been reported previously on OT
algorithms to the best of our knowledge. This paper extends a recent OT
algorithm and studies its performance. By theoretical analyses and performance
experiments, this paper proves that the worst-case execution time of OT only
appears in rare cases, and shows that local responsiveness of OT-based group
editors in fact depends on a number of factors such as the size of the
operation log. The paper also reveals that these two results have general
implications on OT algorithms and hence the design of OT-based group editors
must pay attention to performance issues.

A Multi-Versioning Scheme for Intention Preservation in Collaborative
Editing Systems

Although the multi-version approach to consistency maintenance has been
widely discussed and implemented in database systems, version control systems,
and asynchronous groupware systems, its potential in real-time groupware
systems is largely unexplored. Intention preservation is an important aspect of
consistency maintenance in real-time collaborative editing systems, where
multiple users cooperate with each other by concurrently editing the same
document. The multi-version approach is supposed to be able to preserve
individual users' concurrent conflicting intentions. In this article, we
propose a new multi-versioning scheme that can preserve not only concurrent
conflicting intentions but also contextual intentions while achieving
convergence of the document under editing. By extending an existing
multi-versioning scheme to a general one that specifies the conditions for
convergence, we decouple the discussion of convergence from that of intention
preservation. By constraining the general scheme, we arrive at the novel scheme
that guarantees to preserve users' intentions. The correctness of the scheme
has been formally verified. The design of an algorithm for consistent version
composition and identification has been discussed in detail.

An Approach to Ensuring Consistency in Peer-to-Peer Real-Time Group Editors

Real-time group editors allow distributed users to edit a shared document at
the same time over a computer network. Operational transformation (OT) is a
well accepted consistency control method in state-of-the-art group editors.
Significant progress has been made in this field but there are still many open
issues and research opportunities. In particular, established theoretic OT
frameworks all require that OT algorithms be able to converge along arbitrary
transformation paths. This property is desirable because group editors that
implement such algorithms will not rely on a central component for achieving
convergence. However, this has not been achieved in any published work to our
knowledge. We analyze the root of this problem and propose a novel state
difference based transformation (SDT) approach which ensures convergence in the
presence of arbitrary transformation paths. Our approach is based on a novel
consistency model that is more explicitly formulated than previously
established models for proving correctness. SDT is the first and the only OT
algorithm proved to converge in peer-to-peer group editors.